I haven’t sat down to watch a movie from Netflix in quite a while because there is so much worth watching on TV that I spend most of my TV time catching up on shows that I’ve Tivo’d. Last night I finally sat down to speed watch “Ladder 49”. I’d already been told it wasn’t that good a movie, so I was able to watch this 1 hr 45 min movie in about 1 hr 15 min by speeding by the gratuitous truck-drives-down-street shots and all of the “dramatic” scenes with John Travolta (who, other than in “Pulp Fiction”, I can’t stand).
All in all it was a boring movie – Joaquim Phoenix was surprisingly lifeless in this firefighter movie, considering what a great actor he is normally. The only cool parts of the movie were the fire shots – fire is cool to watch and it was fascinating to watch the fire crawl across ceilings on the few occasions the director allowed us to see stuff like that.
But still not worth sitting through this movie to see 3-4 cool shots of moving fire.
1 it’s-hard-to-believe-“Backdraft”-would-be-the-better-movie out of five.